I've enjoyed a number of (fiction/non-fiction books) about hacker culture and running a software business in the 80's, 90's. For some reason things seemed so much more exciting back then. Examples are:

Today I'm an entrepeneur and programmer. Back in the 80's a I was a young geek hacking DOS TSR's and coding GWBasic / QBasic. In the 90's I was a C.S. university student, experiencing the rise of the Internet world wide.

When reading these books running a software business seemed so much more fun than it is nowadays. Things used to be so much simpler, opportunities seemed to be everywhere and the startups seemed to work with much more real problems (inventing spreadsheets, writing word processors in assembly on 6 different platforms) than all our current web 2.0 social networking toys.

Does anyone share these feelings? Does anyone have any good (personal) stories from back then or know of other good books to read?

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The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling tells the story of the 'meeting' of law enforcement and the cracker/phreaker subculture of the 1990s. Also, it describes in detail the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. That little incident almost put SJG out of business, all for a role-playing supplement not, as the Secret Service described it, a "hacker's manual". Turns out that the Secret Service were actually after copies of a leaked Bell South E911 document.

Founders at Work - interviews with startup founders, starting from the early 80's. It's more about how the founders built up their companies, but it has interesting insights into the programming culture prevalent then as well.